Tag Archives: off topic

Toilet paper. Now there’s something you don’t hear about in the news very often. Not many advances have been made on the bathroom tissue front that I know of. However, Kimberly-Clark has announced something that will shake up your bathroom forever. Well, probably not, but it’s still interesting.

The company has designed a new type of toilet paper roll that doesn’t need a cardboard tube. Apparently using some sort of patented winding technique, they were able to do away with the excess tube, thus eliminating waste. I wonder how long it will be until other companies figure out how to do something similar.

These days it seems like there are countless options of what to do with yourself once you’ve decided to stop breathing. You can be fired into space, turned into a pencil, fashioned into a diamond or even put into an urn shaped just like your head. But what about being transformed into a vinyl record? Yes, you can do that too.

When you bite the dust, you can spend around $3,000 to have your remains pressed into a set of 30 records, each containing 24 minutes of audio (12 minutes per side). Each will come with a cover that lists your name, date of birth, and date of death. You can supply whatever music you like, but company does not accept responsibility for copyright violations from the music you supply. (And what do you care? You’ll be dead!)

If the gadget-loving community ever needed an official mascot, I’m pretty sure Batman would be at the top of the list. I mean he basically makes up for a complete lack of super powers with some of the coolest toys and electronics anyone could ever dream of. And while I’m really happy with what Christian Bale and Christopher Nolan have done with the character in the recent Batman films, I particularly enjoyed the animated series from a few years ago. If you feel the same way, I highly recommend checking out the new trailer for Batman Gotham Knight, a collection of 6 animated films which follow Batman through his early years as the caped crusader.

The Batman Gotham Knight collection will be available on Blu-ray, DVD and On Demand on July 8, 2008. If you’ve been dragging your feet on finally upgrading to a Blu-ray player, I can’t think of a better reason to finally do so.

I’ve come to like living in the downtown core of a big city since the (mostly) reliable public transit has allowed me to sidestep the responsibility of owning a car. But as of Sunday afternoon there was the very real possibility of a public transit strike here in Toronto, which would have meant some unpleasantly long walks for yours truly. Normally I don’t mind walking when the weather is nice, but not having the option of catching a streetcar or the subway if it started raining was a bit worrisome. It was obviously a concern for quite a few others too since I saw a lot of people buying bicycles Sunday afternoon. It was also the first time I ever thought a Segway would actually come in handy. Thankfully a tentative deal was reached just in time which meant that the subway trains, buses and streetcars were running as usual this morning.

This may seem terribly off topic, but there’s a bit of a link to the OhGizmo! ethos here. Hear me out. Part of the reason I started the site was that new things have always fascinated me. Sure, most of the new things I’ve always been interested in were gadgets; innovation (in gadgets and tech) quickly became a focus for the site as a result. But this fascination with new stuff is still a part of me. And sometimes, it backfires, as can be seen above.

See, this is why, when sitting comfortably at a new sushi joint in town, I decided to order the most obscure sounding thing on the menu, something I’d never had: “Fried salmon head with some sort of spice combo I can’t remember”. Sounded nice. Sure. Except that in my head, for a moment, a salmon fish was the size of a goldfish, and the head I was expecting to get was no larger than maybe a thumb. Good one. This is what showed up a few minutes later. This.

OhGizmo! is a frequently updated blog that focuses on covering items that will appeal to a very specific and often very passionate audience: the geek. Aside from the fare of innovative consumer electronic products, the reader can expect to find news about geek culture, absurd inventions, awe inspiring technology, and an ever growing assortment of articles that we like to think fit within our view of what we’re calling the Geek Lifestyle.